To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with a Lync implementation, Forrester interviewed five customers and received survey responses from an additional seven organizations that have deployed Lync 2013. Lync is a unified communications platform that provides webconferencing, instant messaging, collaboration, VoIP, video, private branch exchange (PBX) replacements, and other services.

Prior to Lync 2013, customers reported that they had various solutions in place, including previous versions of Lync, competing products, or no unified communications solution at all. The customers were looking for a solution to improve employee collaboration and efficiency as well as lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). With Lync, customers were able to achieve incremental benefits over their previous solutions, including the elimination of other technologies, increasing business and IT efficiency, and lower telephony costs. Said one IT director, “We achieved many additional benefits above and beyond what we realized with our previous unified communications tools. The service quality was also much better.”